Thrilling Tales – Brains Tubes on Parade

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

Still going, still going… my goal for the week is to finish both the Thrilling Tales trailer and the redos and post work on the story illustrations for Trapped in the Tower of the Brain Thieves.

This was probably the last of the more difficult redos for existing illustrations. Probably. Most of them just need some adjustments to contrast and brightness: that might have been needed anyhow, but the matte paper for the book tends to dull down the contrast of the images and as I’ve seen, that means they need some more lovin’. I stand a pretty good chance of getting through the rest of them in the next couple of days.

The trailer may be finished. I’m not sure yet. There are a couple of things I might like to try differently but the thing that I like least is something that it would be very difficult to change, because it has to do with the pacing and length of the period musical score. That isn’t flexible. About all I could do would be to try a completely different score (after finding one I could use!) and that would lead to a brand new complete edit and, I’d guess, at least a week of new work. This idea does not excite me. So I watch it, and brood a little bit, every night. We’ll just see.

If I meet this week’s schedule, then, I can move on to finishing the web site – several technical things to do there, along with adding non-story content – and I’ll also get to work on the book layout for the print edition. Proofing and finalizing the book is likely to be the real bottleneck. I’m still aimed at a launch for the Thrilling Tales web site before the end of April, and I believe I’ll get there on time.

I’m not posting often here just now because I’m not thinking about much of anything else. Talk amongst yourselves. Confer. Relate.

Update: the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual web site is now alive (alive, I tell you!) at thrilling-tales.webomator.com

Thrilling Tales – the Adventure Continues

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

Okey Doke. As milestones go, this is the big one: I finally finished the last illustration for Part One of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS.

For the moment, I’ll ignore the fact that I still have three inventory illustrations to go; and having ignored that so successfully, I’ll pretend that I don’t expect to redo ten to fifteen of the illustrations I’ve already done; and while this ignoring thing is going so very well I will also neglect to remember that with all the art done I’ll still have a few weeks worth of debugging and finishing to do on the web site. And extras, like desktop wallpapers, to make.

Hey! Ignorance really is bliss!

On the other fronts I am pointedly not looking at the trailer because I’ve looked at it so much I can’t really see it any more. It’s pretty close to being finished. But I need to look at it with fresh eyes so that I’m sure what changes I still need to make.

I have a test book coming from the printer to work out any kinks in the printing process… so that once the art is really, definitely done I can put together the print version.

And I’ve continued to work on the Pulp Sci Fi Title Generator I put together for the Thrilling Tales web site… it’s continued to improve and it’s gotten a spiffy graphical facelift. And I’ve even made a Mini Title-O-Tron that people can install in the sidebars of their own blogs or web sites, if they like: I want to do a Facebook app version but so far whenever I look at their docs, my brain hurts.

So I guess I can take a deep breath for a bit, at which point I’ll need to stop ignoring those things I mentioned above, get them done, and try to catch all these balls I’m juggling at about the same time so that I can launch the site.

Update: the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual web site is now alive (alive, I tell you!) at thrilling-tales.webomator.com

An Airship over the Retro Future

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

Just a random, unprocessed frame from the bit I’m rendering right now for the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual trailer. This is from the second scene. Now that I’ve pretty well worked out the timing for the first minute, I’m going in and making the final versions of those shots.

I’m not sure when I’ll be uploading the finished trailer (heck, I’m not sure when it will be finished). I may not want to promote the site until I’m done with the first printed volume, and ready to get to work on Part II. But I have a good and mysterious reason for wanting to get it done early – I’m thinking about incorporating it into something else that needs to be ready before I start on Part II.

Anyway, this is pretty fun. It’s always nice to see what happens when I put a camera in Retropolis to see what’s moving around, and I don’t do that often (enough?) these days.

Update: the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual web site is now alive (alive, I tell you!) at thrilling-tales.webomator.com

Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual: Progress, and a Trailer in the Works

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

I’m in that last (ish) long haul here, and so I’m quiet; but I’ve got just four more illustrations to go for Trapped in the Tower of the Brain Thieves. One or two are challenging ones, but heck… I’ll take what I can get in the not quite instant gratification area.

I’m actually going slower than I might because I’m splitting my time between these and an animated trailer for the Thrilling Tales web site. It’s weirdly relaxing to switch from working hard on one thing to working equally hard on something different. I can’t explain why that is, but like I said, I’ll take what I can get.

It’s been quite awhile since I dusted off Premiere and put together a piece of video with it (and why do we still call it video?) My old version of Premiere won’t install on my main computer (16 bit installers: gotta love ’em) and on my second one it looked at the memory available – which was way more than its programmers had believed possible, I guess – and ran screaming into the other room. So I had to remove memory to make it work. Go figure.

But anyway, that’s working, I have some neat period music for the soundtrack from the public domain Prelinger archive, and that, like the story, is slowly coming together. Prrrrrrrrogress!

Update: the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual web site is now alive (alive, I tell you!) at thrilling-tales.webomator.com

Thrilling Tales Countdown: 70 Down, 12 to Go

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

Seventy illustrations down, twelve to go!

Doctor Rognvald, like me, is pleased.

I do have one massive exterior set to rebuild for half of those pictures (I’m not happy with the version I made originally) so it’s not what you’d call a slam dunk. But still.

Then there are three remaining inventory images. That’s because – in adventure game style – characters may pick up and carry items around. You get to see a bit of information about those, hence the illustrations of the objects. Add about four or five redos for illustrations I think should be better… some global adjustments for brightness and contrast… and then the art for Part One of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS will be done. Incredible as that may seem. To me, anyhow.

The brightness and contrast adjustments are mainly necessary to sync the web and print versions together – printed art is always a bit dimmer than it seems onscreen – but I’m also fighting the gradual decay of my fine but aging monitor. Every few months I have to check it out and adjust its display. So I’ll make a final pass through all the art at the end to make sure it’s copacetic.

Once the art’s done I can go back to work on the web site. I need to disable or modify one feature that I haven’t used, add another feature that I thought up while working on the illustrations, and implement a couple of things (saving and restoring your place in the story) that I didn’t bother with until I had a story to save and load. Add in some supporting pages, season to taste, fix the couple of problems the site has in the Chrome browser… and there it’ll be.

I’m still hoping to launch the Thrilling Tales site by the end of March. We’ll see.

Update: the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual web site is now alive (alive, I tell you!) at thrilling-tales.webomator.com

T-Shirt Sale at the Retropolis Transit Authority, Saga Shirts, and Hot Wax Tees

Filed under Works in Progress

Tell it to My Giant Robot

Celtic Knotwork Biohazard

My T-shirt printer is four years old this month – and I have to say, anything I did at the age of four just pales by comparison – and to celebrate, they’re having a sale that is slightly less complicated than I’m about to make it sound.

The deal is, you get a discount of up to 20.9% on an order of $25 or more by entering this coupon code during checkout: 4PFBDAY. The exact amount of your discount varies, but for example: on a dark colored t-shirt it’s just over 20%.

I think 20.9% is the top limit. I tried the coupon on a bunch of different orders to see what it would do. ‘Cause, you know, I’m just like that.

The neat thing about this sale is that it’s not, say, $5 off on a shirt: the discount gets applied to whatever your total is. So if you order twenty shirts (please do!) you get a discount on all twenty of them.

The sale runs through February 17.

This is good news if you like the shirts from my Retropolis Transit Authority, Saga Shirts, or Hot Wax Tees. It’s significantly less good news if you don’t like any of them. In which case, those pants make you look fat.

[tags]t-shirts, retropolis transit authority, saga shirts, hot wax tees, sale, coupon, printfection[/tags]

Thrilling Tales, Continued, and Thoughts about Fundraising

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

The rayguns have come out as I near the end of this batch of illustrations in Doctor Rognvald’s lab – and when these are done I think I’ll have nearly reached the "light at the end of the tunnel" stage. Almost.

When I guesstimated that Trapped in the Tower of the Brain Thieves would need about eighty illustrations… I was pretty much exactly dead on. Amazing, seeing as how that involved arithmetic and everything. Next time I’ll track the exact number as I refine the script. It was hard this time because some of the story nodes shared the same illustrations and I didn’t keep a tally of those as I went. Anyway, like I said, eighty pictures was about right. Sixty seven down as of this morning.

I got to thinking last night about Kickstarter. That’s a fundraising web site where a lot of musicians and artists are raising funds for their projects. I’m toying with the idea of trying that when I start Part Two of the story.

The whole thing ends up being a bit like a Public Radio fundraiser in which ever-neater premiums go with the ever-higher contributions. You can see that there’s some math involved there (egad!) to make sure that the total raised, minus the cost of those premiums, still gives you the funds you need. And if the cost of the premiums is high then the project’s funding has to be higher… which makes it harder for the project to reach its goal.

There are some Kickstarter anecdotes here at the Whitechapel forums. Fora. You know what I mean.

And you need an invitation to start a project, so when the time comes I’d have to scramble around on the web looking for one. But it seems like there’ s some potential there. Still thinking.

Update: the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual web site is now alive (alive, I tell you!) at thrilling-tales.webomator.com

Paypal Payments Newly Added to Some of My Sites

Filed under Works in Progress

Paypal is now accepted as a payment option at several of my online stores. So for those who are allergic to credit cards and debit cards, or those of you who’ve burned those cards in a wholly understandable protest against the rampant consumerism that is eroding the foundations of our culture while, oddly enough, paying my bills… now’s the time.

Paypal payments are now accepted at these sites of mine:

	Celtic Art & Retro-Futuristic Design
	at Retropolis: all products except for the ‘Retropolis Transit Authority’ T-Shirts and water bottles
	the Non-Conformists’ Union
	the Retrovert

Thrilling Tales: Brain Thieves Countdown

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

As Gwen and her wrench have a strange interlude in the laboratory of Doctor Rognvald, I seem to be about 75% through with the illustrations for Part One of The Toaster With TW0 BRAINS. That’s nineteen more pictures to go (ten of them set here in the laboratory) plus a couple of redos, and then a little more mechanical work on the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual web site before it’s ready for the public.

What a long haul!

As I’ve worked on this first part – Trapped in the Tower of the Brain Thieves – I’ve learned some things about what will and won’t work well in the format. And about scale: the density of the illustrations is nowhere what you’d find in a comic, but there are still a lot of pictures and they do take time. TWO BRAINS will likely continue in a very similar way but in the future I may try to do shorter story segments just to make sure that the site gets more than seasonal updates.

For reference: I spent a week on the script. Although I’ve edited it some since then, it was pretty well settled at the end of that week. But in order to finish the eighty-odd illustrations I’ve kept at it almost continuously since late August. So at that rate even "seasonal" is a bit optimistic, isn’t it?

And I’ve wrestled a bit with style since at the beginning, knowing what a long road was ahead, I was determined to work out ways to get the pictures done speedily. I’ve pretty much abandoned that by now and I’m more in my usual mode of "It’ll be ready when it’s ready". But there just has to be a middle ground for something of this scale.

Anyway I do hope it works out between the free web versions and the printed book versions – and that I sell a few of the books! The great thing about making so many illustrations is that there’s a handful of them that I want to redo at, say, 18 by 24 inches for posters and prints. Along with preparing the print version and working on Part Two…!

Update: the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual web site is now alive (alive, I tell you!) at thrilling-tales.webomator.com

Thrilling Tales: Gwen Meets Doctor Rognvald

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

"Then his eyes fell on the toaster, and he stepped forward eagerly. Gwen held it out at arm’s length. She was pretty happy to keep the doctor as far away as possible. As he lurched forward, the rolling tray creaked after him with its smaller, modified toaster. She could clearly see the cables that ran up his sleeve and then – she was sure! – out of his collar at the back of his neck. Where they went from there, she told herself, was absolutely none of her business."

Update: the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual web site is now alive (alive, I tell you!) at thrilling-tales.webomator.com